Survey Says: Benefits of Network Management

In our last post, we talked about how network management has become an attractive option for IT. With support and maintenance of network infrastructure costing enterprises significant time and money, IT departments increasingly are considering using third-party providers for these services. These IT departments are seeing benefits such as improved operational performance and better allocation of internal IT resources. CenturyLink surveyed more than 1,000 IT decision-makers across a broad range of industries and locations in the U.S. to gain insight into their network management preferences.

There are many factors to consider when choosing a managed network provider. The most popular among the organizations polled was for the provider to proactively resolve issues.

The benefits that come with using a third-party provider for network services abound. Among current users polled, the most popular expected benefit is that the provider would free up staff time.

For those enterprises that have made the switch to managed network providers, the reasons for doing so vary, but the most common is for the expert perspective a third-party provider brings.

Have you considered or outsourced your network management to a provider? What benefits have you seen? What other drivers do you see for using a network management system?

Thanks for your comment, Dennis! A few things that set our Network Management Service (NMS) solution apart include:

– Experience provider with a long success history of Network Operating Center (NOC) Managed Network Services
– 24/7/365 proactive network and router management from industry-certified, highly skilled IT experts team from U.S.-based NOC
– Single Point of Contact (SPOC) for contacting CenturyLink
– IT domain subject matter experts
– Integrated reporting, automated notifications and alerts and tools
– Comprehensive CPE device support
– Support for public IP and private MPLS networks
– Change management flexibility that allows read/write access to devices
– Service assurance through SLAs

How Does it Work?
CenturyLink Engineers set-up SNMP configurations on the customer’s routers and in our Management infrastructure to create alarms and tickets on parameters set for both polls (coming from NMS out to the customer) and traps (coming directly from the customer router to us). These alarms and tickets allow for faster identification of network issues, which the NMS team proactively works on behalf of the customer. Additionally, as a part of the NMS infrastructure, we pull a comprehensive list of networking reports to provide customers with on-line visibility to their network health and performance that capture Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to allow for better long-term planning and assessments of networking needs and trouble areas, as well as base-lining overall service performance.